Commenter deathbypapers offered to write up a guest-post on historiography behind our book club pick. Some of this is in the notes, and historians in the group will be familiar. Still, I think it's a great frame. As a side note, this is all very eerie for me, as I failed Historiography at Howard. I did retake and pass, though. Anyway, some popular names will pop up here--Authur Schlesinger, Sean Wilentz...

At the risk of "burying the lede," allow me to introduce
myself.My name is John Rosinbum, and I am
a third year PhD student at Arizona State
University and occasional commenter
(deathbypapers).While my specialization
is in the 20th century Americas
(specifically the Central American Refugee Crisis), I was fortunate enough to
participate in a graduate readings seminar that used What Hath God Wrought as
its culminating text.WHGW is an
incredible book, and I look forward to our discussions.

At the same time, it is the type of book that
requires some historiographical context to be fully understood.All historians stand on the shoulders of
those who have come before, even though while standing they often try to trample
(or reinterpret) those underneath. Howe
in WHGW is no exception.Hopefully you
will find the discussion below useful.I
will be lurking in the comments so feel free to offer critiques or ask me to
elaborate.

For decades historians have believed that Jackson
and his ilk were the most important figures of the era between the War of 1812
and the Great Compromise/Seneca Falls Convention. Historians of this
school include such luminaries as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Sean Wilentz. For
Schlesinger struggle between the lower classes made up of urban workers and
small farmers against the upper class composed of factory owners and the landed
gentry crystallized over the debate to extend the franchise.The successful extension of the right-to-vote
to non-propertied whites, coupled with the nation's territorial growth, made
this an era chiefly characterized by expansion.

Wilentz's thesis is a bit more sophisticated than Schlesinger's.Rather than placing the undifferentiated
masses at the foundation of Jacksonian democracy, Wilentz highlights the role
of highly skilled urban artisans.Developed in Chants Democratic and further refined in The Rise of
American Democracy, Wilentz argues that the artisans made up a highly self-conscious
republican working class that fought the imposition of wage labor while
simultaneously agitating for their right to vote.

In 1991 Charles Sellers published another compelling interpretation of the era appropriately titled The Market Revolution. Originally intended to be an entry in the Oxford History Series, the series editor Charles V. Woodward rejected it due to its methodological complexity, weighty language and somewhat dubious assertions. Sellers' scathing analysis of the period argues that the onset and growth of market capitalism, rather than electoral or territorial expansion, characterized the period. Using intense statistical analysis that has come under fire for both its methodology and selection, Sellers paints a dim portrait of the era. As capitalism inexorably drew small farmers and artisans into the unfriendly confines of wage labor it destroyed everything from family farms to male libido.

Howe's magisterial synthesis is the latest attempt to understand the period. Instead of Jacksonian Democrats or economic forces, Howe presents John Quincy Adams, Whigs and technological developments as the most important actors of the period. Whereas Schlesinger and Wilentz look at political and territorial expansion, Howe is more interested in cultural and technological transformation. Nor is capitalism a global force for evil, as it is in Sellers's account. It prompts and funds the communication and transportation revolutions, which in turn decrease provincialism and give liberty the space to operate. I won't get any further into Howe's argument, as we have many weeks to discuss it, but I wanted to make sure that we established the historiographical background before launching in. I know I will be thinking about the tension between expansion and transformation. For those who are really interested in the topic I included a short list of books for further reading below.

Religion:

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1989).

Women/Gender:

Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (1986).

Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (1995).

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Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.